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Sanitizing a Storage Area Network (SAN)

I've done a little searching, and I cannot seem to find any products designed to sanitize an entire SAN, or multiple disks in a SAN. I am not very knowledgeable in SANs; I'm only doing research for possible products in sanitizing a SAN.

I guess it depends on exactly what you mean by "sanitising". When I worked in the WMD sector it meant degaussing (magnetic media) and physical destruction. OK with CD/DVD and tape media acetone then fire......

If you just mean wiping, then a SAN could be a problem if it consists of disparate devices.

You would really need total physical control, and be sure that you got every device, as not all may be connected at any one point in time. This would be an issue even if your objective was just to wipe the data by overwriting.

I believe that there is commercial software (*nix based?) that will analyse networks such as SANs and wipe them, but I have never come across them personally. I have no idea how they would handle the boot issue?

If you have hybrid or SSD devices then all bets are off. That technology is way different from the regular old magnetic drive.

Check out the University of California, as I have seen some papers from them on the subject (of SSDs).

Please remember that a software wipe will only work if the device is functional and fully accessible. Regular magnetic drives are prone to leave recoverable data in areas they have marked as bad. This is even worse with SSDs, as they seem to have far more space allocated for this purpose.

Finally, how can you be sure that you got everything? as I see it SAN + Cloud = when it comes to secure data destruction.